K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Oh no, more distractions. …

Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I really, really should not have done this.

Yes, that’s Tribes. And yes, it’s running in Wine, under Arch Linux.

I used to play this — a lot — ten years ago, over dialup, with a clearance-aisle Voodoo3 card on a 450Mhz Pentium II machine I built out of spare parts. I was hopelessly addicted. I even bought the full game, a legitimate copy, after I couldn’t bear the demo’s Raindance map any longer.

I weaned myself off it, but only barely, and only by moving to a third world country where there was no electricity and no indoor plumbing (I’m serious about that, you know).

I knew it was possible to run it under Wine, and I had even set it up under Ubuntu a long time ago, but cast it off before the bug bit me again. And of course, the game is free now, and downloadable off the Sierra FTP site.

So now it seems my addiction is back, this time running on my 1Ghz laptop, with the 64Mb Geforce4 440 Go. In glorious 1600×1200, with more screen real estate than ever. No lag and no stutter … even when I’m drawing a bead with the laser rifle, sniping you from out-of-bounds. You don’t like it? Get more armor.

Sigh. This could be a bad thing.

P.S.: If you do download the full game from Sierra, remember that you’re getting an installation that starts at 1.8, and you’ll probably want the 1.8 to 1.11 patch that’s in the update folder.

6 thoughts on “Oh no, more distractions. …”

Well, it was back in 1997. No doubt by now it’s a bit dated or even tame. But if it’s any testimony, there are still hundreds of working servers that usually have players on them, and clans are still operating here and there. It has longevity, even if it is outdated.